630 to 660 to 710 (47M, 40V)

exodus7 · Wed Oct 28, 2009 9:12 pm

Thank you God, and i mean that in the most sincere way to God.

My previous post
http://www.beatthegmat.com/dejected-660-48m-34v-t45558.html

Took the gmat today, it's been a long long journey (2-3 years) and it's finally over. in the past month, i can't say i've really done much prep, other than go over the fundamentals of CR (using the superprep book and the powerscore book) and prayed to God i'd do better. in my previous attempt, i felt like it was somewhat of an anomaly because of my gmatprep practices which were around 700.

IN THE END, i felt like my performance in the gmat was not about the endless amounts of practice that i did or my preparation, even though i did do the necessary amount. i believe that my scoring actually came down to performance / confidence / timing during the actual test. don't underestimate nerves and also do not underestimate the VARIANCE in actual test day questions and how they may stump you. FOR EXAMPLE, i felt like i may have gotten a perfect verbal reading comprehension passage list today. no science, all business, only 1 long passage but overall, very easy to read and "lightweight" as opposed to the super hard.

Question for y'all. my 47math is a 78th percentile, but my previous attempt resulted in a 48 (83 percentile), will business schools look down on the 47? and can i "show" them i'm capable of a 48?

Back to top

papgust · Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:16 pm

Back to top

exodus7 · Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:35 pm

hi papgust, i would like to share what i did, but similar to the AWA argument essay i wrote today, it's hard to pin a couple factors as casual to the end result of doing well, when i've done so many different things, like a shot gun approach to trying to do better. i don't fall in the category of a natural test taker, so i feel like my approach has definitely been more brute force than simply tweaking a couple things.

1. the mgmat class i took makes you do almost all the og, verbal, and math ones as well. they have a bunch of strategies which are good, but in the end you need to figure out the ones that work the best for you.

2. private tutor emphasized proving 2 cases for insufficient DS. verbal, eliminate answers more than try to find the right one, though i had to compromise this approach in my actual gmat and go on gut feeling at the end because i was running out of time. i owe a friend who scored 750 for this approach. if you're a native english speaker who has gone through college and read a reasonable amt of books, your ear should be really good for the tough sc problems, where its' about meaning and construction more than obvious grammar rules.

overall, i did soo many problems, hundreds if not thousands of problems. towards the middle i started to realize i needed to keep an error log, which i kind of did, but my tutor was able to immediately pick up trends and try to diagnose them.

FOCUS ON THE OG GMAT problems. Yes, i did lsat crs, but then i realized that maybe i wasn't even getting the hard gmat crs correctly, so i tried to focus on og again.

I did the gmatclub super hard math problems, but again, had to focus on the og problems to score my 48.

timing is huge on the gmat, try to figure out how to manage time on math. it's ok to guess on the last 7-15 problems, that's all i'm going to say, if you'd like to find out more, do some research on the forums. try it on a gmatprep.

i'll try to think of more tips.

Back to top

crackgmat007 · Sat Oct 31, 2009 10:56 am

Congrats on the score. Really curious to know what helped to boost your verbal score from 30 to 40? Can you summarize your approach - prep, exam taking strategies (especially in verbal) - that helped you increase your verbal score? Tx.

Back to top

exodus7 · Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:02 am

hi crack gmat007, i really felt my subpar performances 30 and 34 were more the result of bad test day execution and nerves than reflecting my true ability.

on og questions, i very rarely missed cr questions, but i did use the lsat superprep book, rc i needed to improve on, but i ditched all the manhattan gmat strategies and went with reading the entire passage and really trying to understand (as opposed to skimming). for the questions, i used poe and tried to PROVE the answer in the passage.

sc i probably made the largest inroads using the manhattan sc book, and doing hundreds of problems to see which approach worked the best. i used a combination of poe with grammar rules and trying to find splits with intuition and learning to trust my ear. i think this combination allowed me to do better on the harder more vague sc questions without having to learn a bunch of idioms etc.

hope that helps!

Back to top

theK · Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:31 am

Congratulations! I wouldn't worry if I were you. 710 is a solid score. If your AWA score is good, and the rest of your application is solid, 710 should get you into the top 10 schools.

Back to top

630 to 660 to 710 (47M, 40V)

Free GMAT Prep Resources

Latest GMAT Articles

Latest GMAT Videos

Popular Resources